Who, or what, is behind the “purge” of top-level U.S. military officers during the Obama administration, with estimates of the number of senior officers fired during the last five years edging toward 200.

According to Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, formerly the deputy commanding general of the Pacific Command, who has served as a Fox News senior military analyst , a good part of the blame belongs to Obama’s close adviser, Valerie Jarrett. Rampant “political correctness” due to her influence is now permeating the military and negatively affecting everyone from top generals to the ranks of the enlisted.

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Milwaukee, Wisconsin State Representative and Democrat candidate for Governor Brett Hulsey told reporters last week that he was going to hand out KKK hoods at the Republican State Convention, which took place last weekend. After major backlash, he instead decided to wear a homemade confederate uniform and talk to GOP members about what he called their racist agenda. This new video shows Hulsey’s interaction with one convention attendee.

As technological developments increased farm yields over the last two centuries, the share of the US population employed in agriculture fell from around 90 percent to around 2 percent.

The lay American public supposes that when workers lose their jobs, we become worse off — they suffer from what economist Bryan Caplan calls the ‘make-work’ bias. But would anyone prefer to live in a society in which many went hungry and no one enjoyed the wealth, financial security, job growth, and innovation created as all those workers lost their farm jobs?

Follow Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, as he explains the gap between the public’s opinion and the economist’s facts. In this video, Caplan talks about the merits and demerits of ‘making work’ – instead of letting individuals find work.

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Frederic Bastiat contends that to aim to increase the proportion of effort to output is to imitate Sisyphus in his hopeless attempt to move a stone up a hill:

South African voters are headed to the polls this week for the fourth national election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president after the end of the apartheid regime.

Their country represents epic history in our lifetimes. After a decades-long struggle against brutal, state-run racial segregation, the black liberation movement emerged victorious in the early 1990s. Led by the transcendent figure of Mandela, South Africa swiftly dismantled the apartheid apparatus and, defying dour predictions of a bloody race war, peacefully transitioned to majority rule. Mandela’s government ushered in pluralistic democracy on a continent long-defined by colonialism and autocracy. State officials established remarkably robust constitutional protections for individual rights.

Black South Africans would finally be afforded the economic and social opportunities they’d been denied for so long.

Or so everyone had hoped.

Two decades later, Mandela’s promise of renewal has largely gone unfulfilled as Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC) has maintained its huge electoral majority. The beautiful dream animating the South African experiment is crumbling amidst ongoing corruption, violence, and failed economic policies. As Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu has said of the current regime, “This government—our government—is worse than the apartheid government.”

“Life After Liberation,” directed and hosted by Rob Montz, details the role played by political monopoly in South Africa’s post-apartheid decline. The documentary shows how the ANC has grown corrupt and complacent—and how widespread resentment of the ruling political class is now fueling the rise of a populist demagogue, Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, who is pushing precisely the sort of Mugabeist socialist policies that have ruined so many other African countries.

“If we knew everything then that we know now, one week after it happened, I think that would have been really devastating to [Obama’s reelection] campaign,” says former CBS reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, referencing the 2012 Benghazi terrorists attacks. Recently revealed White House emails suggest that the Obama administration may have attempted to mislead the American public by placing the blame on an Internet video and not Islamic terrorists, which would have raised questions about Obama’s foreign policy strategy.

Attkisson, an award winning investigative reporter, was one of the few journalists who continued pursuing the Benghazi story long after many in the main stream media lost interest. According to Attkisson, her bosses at CBS wanted her to drop the story. As a result, she left CBS, her employer for two decades, this past March over what she claims is “liberal bias” at the network and a lack of serious devotion to investigative reporting.

She goes on to say that many in her field are frustrated by the decline of hard-hitting investigative reporting endemic at all networks and not just CBS. The congealing of corporate, news, and political interests at networks have made investigative journalism a relic of the past.

“As one whistleblower put it to me: things have never been worse for people who try to speak the truth inside the government about illegalities and wrong doing. In their view, and I tend to agree, every administration is more clamped down and closed than the one before it. And the next one starts at the finishing point. It’s very hard to make it go backwards. There are rules being implemented now against journalists and the type of work that we do that I think will be very hard to unwind.”

Attkisson sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to discuss her reporting on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and the decline of investigative journalism in America.

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I’m amazed. Most Ameicans have fallen for the leftist lie that fascism is a right wing philosopy rather than its true roots in socialism.

Last year, Rob Schneider joined the growing pool of former Saturday Night Live cast members to “come out” as conservative. “I have been a lifelong Democrat and I have to switch over,” the comedian said at the time and it appears he’s evolved even further since then. During an appearance on The Chris Stigall Show Friday, Schneider said his act has become more and more political and said he tries not to be “100% left or 100% right” but rather down the middle.

But at the same time, he warned, “Democracies don’t end well. We are sliding very fast towards fascism. It’s an ugly kind of thing. There’s this kind of mob mentality that we have to be careful of.”

Later in the interview, Schneider targeted President Barack Obama directly, saying, “There’s not one segment of business under the Obama administration that hasn’t been hurt.”

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Consensus is nonsense in science. Proof is the only value and when I studied the scientific method the scientist had to release his/her data and methods (something Michael “the dog ate my homework” Mann resisted doing because of anticipated nit-picking) to be repeated and verified by others in order to be proven.

Every day, we are bombarded by attention grabbing headlines that promise miracle cures to all of our ailments — often backed up by a “scientific study.” But what are these studies, and how do we know if they are reliable? David H. Schwartz dissects two types of studies that scientists use, illuminating why you should always approach the claims with a critical eye.